Microsoft CEO: Surface RT sales off to a 'modest' start

Just over two weeks since the Surface RT launched -- dogged with delivery troubles, peeling accessories, and even vulnerable to early critical security flaws -- Microsoft's boss says sales are off to a "modest" start.

He also told the Parisian publication said that he expects the upcoming Windows Phone 8 sales to "ramp up quickly." Devices running the next-generation Microsoft smartphone platform were released three days after the Surface tablet in late October.

And that's all he said. Not even a hint of anything else. (Thanks for the specifics, Steve.)

The day after Windows Phone 8 device went on sale at the end of October, Ballmer boasted that four million copies of Windows 8 had been sold, the latest desktop operating system which later Surface tablets will run, in just the few days after it launched. (By comparison, in the same four days after Apple released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the company reported that more than three million copies of the software had been downloaded from the Mac App Store.)

But not everything out of the Redmond, Seattle-based company has been smooth in the past few weeks.

But just over a fortnight after the Surface went on sale and Windows 8 was launched, primed and ready to be used on desktop and laptops all over the world, Microsoft issued its latest Patch Tuesday advisory notice, warning that Windows 8 had three "critical" security vulnerabilities while the Surface RT device had one critical security flaw.

Patches for the vulnerabilities be dished out over Windows Update tomorrow on Tuesday.

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